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Pennsylvania business growth had been hobbled for years by abuse of the ludicrously strong union state workers compensation laws, and he set about reforming that as well. And, of course, he tackled welfare reform. But Ridge's No. 1 priority has always been bringing more jobs to the state by producing a more compliant atmosphere for business. Job growth is up, unemployment is down, spokesman Reeves argues, so what are all these Democrats complaining about?
He's right, in a way. Harrisburg Democrats, not surprisingly, do tend to seize on the ugliest statistics about the state, projectile-vomiting on Ridge's glossy sheen. And what they seize on is this: The United States Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that Pennsylvania's job growth staggered last year -- the state ranks 47th nationally, lagging significantly behind each of its neighboring states. (New York is 20th, Maryland at 17th, Delaware at 9th, New Jersey at 26th, Ohio at 38th, and even lowly West Virginia, usually good for a laugh, edges by in 43rd). From 1998-99, Democrats fume, the Keystone State added only 5,900 jobs. "Many Pennsylvanians who were previously unable to find work have moved," slams Democratic State Sen. Vince Fumo, invoking the state's notorious brain-drain and population loss, which is expected to lead to the loss of two congressional seats after federal redistricting based on the 2000 census. "Ridge administration policies ... focused too narrowly on tax cuts geared only toward big business," Fumo has said. "Large corporations have continued their trend toward downsizing while small businesses and high-tech start-up companies who are a major source of new job creation have not received broad-based tax relief." That seems something of a stretch. On the whole, Pennsylvania's economy is chugging along just fine, and to damn Ridge with one minor glitch of a statistic -- while withholding credit for Ridge's six previous years of bravura performances, at least according to the Bureau of Labor statistics -- is partisanship at its worst. When Ridge took office, Pennsylvania ranked 45th among the states in job growth; by 1998 Pennsylvania ranked 16. And, Reeves claims, the state's massive population loss is part of a three-decade-long trend. "It's amazing to us when they cite" the new Bureau of Labor Statistics figure, Reeves says. "Our state is so partisan," he says, repeating a Rutgers University study that ranked Pennsylvania as having one of the most harshly partisan state capitals in the nation. "It's amazing to us that people are willing to tear down Pennsylvania to people like you to take a shot at Governor Ridge," Reeves says. "I mean, we're not naive; we play hard. But our unemployment rate is lower than the national average and our job growth is related to that. We have almost statistical full employment." The main shot that Democrats and some Republicans, like Lawless, take at Ridge, however, is that he's worked a little too hard on behalf of business; they point often at the $400 million worth of bonds Ridge lobbied for to build four new stadiums, two in Philadelphia and two in Pittsburgh. Democrat Rendell says all four, but particularly the ones in Pittsburgh, were crucial to the cities' economies to attract jobs and tourism. Republican Lawless, though, wonders why middle-class taxpayers are saddled with paying for bonds that will only help corporations that rent out skyboxes at the stadiums. Middle-class taxpayers "can't afford tickets to the games anyway, or the $5 hotdogs or whatever," he says. "Why are we paying that bond money so Tom Ridge can give millionaires and billionaires playgrounds? Why not put that into reducing property taxes or to seniors to pay for their prescription drugs?" Lawless has similar criticism for the $430 million deal Ridge worked out with a Norweigan company, Kvaerner ASA, that promised to build a private shipyard in Philadelphia. After fumbling the original deal with German company Meyer Werft, (a Philadelphia Business Journal op-ed called it "Ridge's Amateur Hour") Ridge worked hard for a worse deal with Kvaerner; that project fell through and eventually was decried on a July 1999 NBC Nightly News program, "The Fleecing of America," for costing taxpayers $606,000 per job in an industry almost wiped out in this country due to cheap overseas labor. Lawless' rant, however, develops into a deeper critique when he discusses how the "corporate-driven" Ridge ended up securing the votes in the General Assembly for his various corporation-coddling projects. To understand Lawless' story, you have to understand that Harrisburg is one of the sleaziest state capitals in the country. Pennsylvania campaign-finance laws are among the flimsiest, and the state's spirit of democracy has seen better days. Pennsylvania has more uncontested state legislative elections than most any other comparably sized state, with almost 90 percent of Statehouse members running unopposed in primaries and 38 percent running unopposed in the general election. Voter turnout is significantly down. Ridge promised to clean up the capitol when he ran for governor in 1994, saying he had "one message -- change Harrisburg honestly." He decried pay raises for the Legislature and, significantly, railed against "legislative initiative grants." The grants, nicknamed "WAMs," for "walking-around money," were given to General Assembly members for projects in their districts, doled out by legislative leaders to good soldiers as they campaigned for reelection. WAMs were Pennsylvania sleaze at its greasiest: secretive, stinking of cronyism, far removed from the very people whose cash was being spent. "WAMs were a legal slush fund through which legislative leaders would buy off votes," says Barry Kauffman, executive director of Pennsylvania Common Cause. Assessing the choice between Ridge and Lt. Gov Singel, the Allentown Morning Call made it pretty clear what it thought of Harrisburg. "Given the choice between a candidate steeped in Harrisburg's political culture and one nurtured outside it, take the outsider," the paper wrote in its 1994 endorsement of Ridge. When a newspaper considers the guy from Washington, D.C., to be the obvious "clean" candidate, you know something's rotten in the state of Keystone. Ridge changed his tune on the pay raise for state legislators pretty quick, soon signing into law an 18 percent pay raise for the General Assembly and state Senate. "The governor was initially opposed to that," Reeves acknowledges. "The General Assembly made it very clear in very short order how important it was to them, and what an impediment it would be to any business being done if he didn't sign off on it. So he did what he believed was the right thing for him to do at time for Pennsylvania. It wasn't something that he enjoyed." Far more troubling: After Ridge was elected, he soon replaced WAMs with "Community Revitalization Program" grants, or CRPs, to be administered by ... guess who? "He basically took over the WAMs system through CRP grants," says Common Cause's Kauffman. "From what we've been told by some grant administrators, basically what Ridge does is he reserves certain amounts of the grant money to use to buy votes on legislative initiatives. And it's all technically legal." Auditor General Bob Casey Jr., a Democrat, studied the CRP program early on and found that $15 million had been given in grants without "any formal or written criteria." "Ridge said he was going to do away with WAMs, but all he did really was escalate them, as it turns out," says Republican Lawless. "I sat in a meeting during Ridge's first term, and I will never forget it. One representative said, 'Governor, what about you taking away WAMs?' And at this point it was clear that WAMs weren't going away, they were just gonna be completely under his control. "So the representative said, 'What about this monument in Erie?' that Ridge was having built. And I'll never forget it as long as I live, Ridge said, 'You know what, George, you're right. WAMs are gone.' And the representative said, 'Well? What about that?' And Ridge looked at him and said, 'Well, when you're governor, you can get WAMs.' And that's how he gets his votes when he needs them." Just last week, Lawless says, when Ridge was pushing forward an education bill that would take away local control from failing schools, Ridge pulled out the old CRP paycheck. "There's a representative who said he was against it, against it, against it. Then he voted for it. And I said, 'Why? I thought you were against it!' And he said, 'I am against it. But I can't turn down the money they offered me.' He buys their votes." "Well," Lawless catches himself, "'buy' is a bad word. Let's say he negotiates them very well with public funds."
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